Monday, December 7, 1998

Catching up on the worthy tidbits

by Molly Ivins

AUSTIN — Sometimes valuable little news nuggets get lost in the shuffle of big events. What with last month’s plebiscite, the departure of Newt Gingrich and the ritual blink-off with Saddam Hussein, I find I have overlooked several worthy tidbits.

For one thing, I haven’t even gotten around to saluting the Candidate of the Year, Byron “Low-Tax” Looper of Tennessee. So hot did the fires of political ambition burn in the breast of Low-Tax Looper that he had his middle name changed from Anthony to Low-Tax. A week before Election Day, according to authorities, Low-Tax took the ultimate step in negative campaigning and killed his opponent in a state Senate race. Then, the voters elected his opponent’s widow. Still, a man that determined to lower your taxes ...

And if you think the guys who lost were a little strange, regard the wonders tucked away in Congress’ last act before leaving town: a $520 billion, 40-pound, 4,000-page appropriation bill that nobody had read. The bill, covering about a third of the federal budget, was weeks late and crammed with goodies and policy decisions never seen by members of Congress, much less debated by them.

What a piece of work that was — Republicans had deliberately delayed the bill in hopes of trapping the president into signing an $80 billion tax cut he had already promised to veto. When the bill finally got unstuck and started to move, lo, members busily attached all kind of pork and ideological crankiness. A variety of publications and advocacy groups have been toiling through the bill to locate such gems as:

Tax breaks for turkey ranchers.

A $250,000 grant to an Illinois laboratory to research the use of caffeinated chewing gum to keep military personnel awake at their posts. (Don’t say your government never does anything for you.)

Extension of the duck-hunting season in Mississippi, courtesy of Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott. Think how startled the Mississippi Legislature, which normally decides such things, must have been.

(However, Lott lost on something that would have helped an old friend of his back home in the scrap metal business: an attempt to exempt the entire scrap metal industry from environmental clean-up requirements.)

A present for the folks in the big rigs. A Republican honcho whose northern Virginia district is choked with traffic tucked in tightened safety regulations on 18-wheel trucks. But, oops, the American Trucking Association is a big giver to the GOP, so Gingrich took it right out again.

One billion dollars to revive the Star Wars project, the dumbest idea Ronald Reagan ever had. I used to hear conservatives gripe that it’s almost impossible to kill off a government program once it gets started, no matter how dumb it is. Now, I see what they mean.

A congressionally imposed delay on the Department of Transportation’s implementation of new rules designed to help small, start-up airlines deal with unfair competition. A little help for the major airlines there.

Special immigrant visa rights so computer companies can bring more foreign computer programmers to Silicon Valley — despite the industry’s tendency to fire older American workers.

A $6 million grant for the proposed Robert Dole Institute of Public Service and Policy at the University of Kansas.

A ban on a needle-exchange program in Washington, D.C. Now, AIDS and other deadly diseases can spread more easily.

Nine billion dollars more for weapons than the Pentagon asked for. Amazingly, much of this unwanted, unneeded hardware is to be built in the home districts of the most powerful congressional leaders.

A monumentally dumb measure opening more of Florida’s barrier islands to future development at the taxpayers’ expense. (Of the 50 anti-environmental riders originally stuck onto the bill, the White House and environmental groups were able to stop all but 15. This was one of the ones they missed.)

Developers cannot obtain loans to build on barrier islands without federal flood insurance. Every time a hurricane comes along and wipes out all these fancy beach homes, the owners just rebuild with federal money. This program is already a scandal, perennially featured in roundups of money-wasting government endeavors; how dumb do you have to be to extend what everyone knows is a bad program? The bill makes nine barrier islands eligible for federal flood insurance and 49 other federal subsidies that pave the way for development.

A $1 million grant for “peanut quality research” that will benefit Gingrich’s home district.

And much, much more.

This kind of really bad legislating is not inevitable. It is possible — in fact, it’s not even difficult — to legislate openly without these last-minute special-interest bazaars. Over to you, Bob Livingston.

Molly Ivins’ column regularly runs on Mondays and Thursdays.

Creators Syndicate, Inc.